The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Anytime I hear about a new service or new piece of functionality that allows me (not to mention other small business owners) to automate what was formerly a manual process, I get excited. It’s a little known fact that SMBs have nearly as complex processes within their organizations as do larger businesses, but without the corresponding resources to throw at wrangling said processes. Automation therefore is arguably more important for SMBs than it is for enterprises.

Check is an interesting company that Intuit acquired a few months ago, the company is rolling out a trial version of new functionality that is pretty interesting. The idea of Photo Bill Pay is, as the name suggests, that small business owners and employees can simply take a photo of a bill (currently it’s only supported on Android devices). On the following screen the scanned bill, and digitized information from that bill are shown. The user can then simply click a box to confirm payment from their nominated bank account or credit card – no more wrangling unfriendly internet banking user interfaces, no more writing and posting checks and no more getting payment amounts wrong when moving from one system to the other – the whole idea of the app is to zap bill payments processes and make it easy to pay bills quickly and with as little paper as possible.

Check is already integrated with most US banks and hence this bill payment feature will work for most SMB users. If the trial goes well Check expects the functionality to be generally available, and cross device, by the end of the year.

Like the best of ideas, this is really simple at the front end, but hides significant complexity at the back end. Integrating with a plethora of different banking systems, handling the complexities of digitizing content and ensuring results are as accurate as possible and delivering it all on various form factors are just some of the battles that the Check team had to fight.

It’s also an interesting release since it’s the first piece of news for Check post acquisition – it shows how Intuit is rapidly innovating beyond its primary product line in an effort to increase its footprint within US SMBs, something that is increasingly important as upstart Xero tries to make a dent in its SMB accounting business.

This is a piece of technology that makes me happy, only dulled by the fact that it’s US only and hence won’t work for my businesses.